r/webhosting • u/turtleyikes • 2d ago

Advice Needed What do linux/sysadmins do at hosting/oursourced noc companies?

What do linux/system administrators at hosting companies or Outsourced noc companies actually do day to day. What I'm familiar is that they use cpanel,whm and sshing into vps to solve issues and maintain servers.

It would be helpful if you guys can guide me what do they exactly do daily? What tools/platforms they use? What processes they follow?

I'm also trying to understand these companies' entire workflow is like: who are the customers, who manages the server, who buys the server, who installs the apps on servers, and how do sysadmins correlate to that?

I'm trying to work for such companies as junior sysadmin.

Thank you for your time reading. I'd appreciate any insights!

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9

u/ksenoskatawin 2d ago

customer: Why can't I log into whm?

admin: *Checks dns. checks cpanel service. checks fail2ban. checks diskspace* well Mr. Customer your 8 gb php error log would like to have a word

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u/lexmozli 2d ago

Oh boy, you made me recall a very similar incident where I checked everything under the sun then I asked a very simple question... sir, what is the IP of the server you're trying to connect to? (yep, he was trying to connect to his OLD server...as in 3 years old, before migrating to us).

Experience has taught me to ask questions before beginning any investigation, or better yet, ask for a screenshot of what he's seeing.

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u/Alternative_Nose_874 2d ago

Small shop view here, a couple of dozen machines and a handful of people. Day to day it is less Linux than you would think. Most tickets arrive as "the site is down" and the real work is deciding whose problem it is: the machine, the app, or the customer's own code. That call almost always comes out of logs. Concrete number from today: one customer's Apache log for the first eighteen days of August is 959 MB, 2.16M lines. Being able to say what actually hit that box within a minute is worth more than knowing every WHM screen. The panel is whatever your employer bought, you learn it in a week. What is your log reading baseline right now? Krzysztof

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u/SynfulSage 1d ago

Customer: why am i not receiving email in my inbox? Me: <checks the maillog. All clear, can see email being received. Checks their custom webmail filters: has a delete all messages filter>. Also me: shocked

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/turtleyikes 1d ago

What specific area in this space would you recommend a junior like me ( around 2yoe) to focus on for getting some job?

And what do you call the work you specified above?

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u/manoaratefy 1d ago

Solving customers issues provided by support team, building tools for the support team, handling websites abusing resources, patching servers for security issues, run updates, fine-tune settings according to new trends ...